Dassault Aviation is planning to offer Falcon business-jet operators a computerised, CD-ROM-based troubleshooting system, to speed up fault diagnosis and improve dispatch reliability.
The Computer Assisted Troubleshooting System (CATS) was initially developed to assist Dassault's Falcon help-desk to evaluate the symptoms of a malfunction and propose the most likely solution, but it will be made available to operators from the first quarter of 1997.
The CATS database incorporates information resulting from around 7,000 technical field reports and some 6,500 telephone calls to the Falcon help-desk. According to Dassault, the CATS integrates case-based reasoning and probability-of-failure rates, to develop a list of suspected components. It also describes the location of each component, its function, how to test it and how to replace it.
"Unlike systems used by other manufacturers, CATS isn't just based on the theory of how a system works," says Jon Lax, manager of special projects for customer support at Dassault. "It also calls on the experience of thousands of field reports and help-desk calls to identify the most logical source of the malfunction."
Source: Flight International
